Structural representations of students' knowledge before and after science instruction

Champagne, Audrey B.; Klopfer, Leopold E.; Desena, Alphonse T.; Squires, David

doi:10.1002/tea.3660180202

Cited by 84 publications

(44 citation statements)

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“…Conceptual knowledge consists of content information that can be structurally organized within a knowledge domain or a particular topic in that domain. Central to this structural organization are the interrelationships among the main concepts in the knowledge domain (e.g., Alao & Guthrie, 1999;Champagne, Klopfer, Desena, & Squires, 1981;Chi, de Leeuw, & Chiu, 1994;Guthrie & Scafiddi, 2004). Student questions, then, may support expository text comprehension to the extent that they support building a conceptual knowledge structure that includes the main concepts and essential relationships among the concepts in the text (Taboada & Guthrie, 2004).…”

Section: Questioning and The Conceptual Level Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Contributions of Student Questioning and Prior Knowledge to Construction of Knowledge from Reading Information Text

Taboada

Guthrie

2006

Journal of Literacy Research

123

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This study investigated the relationship of student-generated questions and prior knowledge with reading comprehension. A questioning hierarchy was developed to describe the extent to which student-generated questions seek different levels of conceptual understanding. Third-and fourth-grade students (N = 360) posed questions that were related to their prior knowledge and reading comprehension, measured as conceptual knowledge built from text. The results indicated that student questioning accounted for a significant amount of variance in students' reading comprehension, after accounting for the contribution of prior knowledge. Furthermore, low-and high-level questions were differentially associated with low and high levels of conceptual knowledge gained from text, showing a clear alignment between questioning levels and reading comprehension levels.

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Section: Questioning and The Conceptual Level Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Contributions of Student Questioning and Prior Knowledge to Construction of Knowledge from Reading Information Text

Taboada

Guthrie

2006

Journal of Literacy Research

123

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“…Cognitive structure is a hypothetical construct indicating the organization of concepts in learners' long-term memories and the relationships between them (Shavelson, 1974). Some researchers also use other terms, such as structural knowledge (Jonassen et al, 1993) and knowledge structure (Champagne et al, 1981;Nakiboglu, 2008) to describe cognitive structure. Ausubel (1963, p. 217) highlighted the significance of this hypothetical construct as the principal factor in the accumulation of knowledge: ''If existing cognitive structure is clear, stable, and suitably organized, it facilitated the learning and retention of new subject matter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Probing high school students' cognitive structures and key areas of learning difficulties on ethanoic acid using the flow map method

Zhou

Wang

Zheng

2015

Chem. Educ. Res. Pract.

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The purpose of this study was primarily to explore high school students' cognitive structures and to identify their learning difficulties on ethanoic acid through the flow map method. The subjects of this study were 30 grade 1 students from Dong Yuan Road Senior High School in Xi'an, China. The interviews were conducted a week after the students had received instruction on ethanoic acid. The interview narratives were then transcribed into flow maps. Analysis of the flow maps showed that there existed a difference between the individual students' cognitive structure on ethanoic acid, higher academic achievers constructed more enriched cognitive structures and had higher scores for cognitive structural variables than lower academic achievers. Furthermore, the results of the correlation analysis of the students' cognitive structure outcomes, academic achievement and the information processing modes revealed that there was a positive correlation between two of them to some extent; in general, the higher academic achievers tended to have higher cognitive structure outcomes and employed high-order information processing modes. Analysis of the content of the flow maps of all the participants indicated that most of the students knew the main facts about ethanoic acid, but the details were not complete, and the misconceptions were mainly related to the molecular constitution and structure of ethanoic acid as well as to the esterification reaction, while the knowledge of the physical properties and the acidity of ethanoic acid seemed to have been mastered relatively well, as for the applications of ethanoic acid, students only mentioned that it can be used as condiment.

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“…It differs from the psychometrically oriented probes mainly in that the student depicts her or his ideas as a concept or cognitive map, which is a spatial arrangement of concepts and their mutual relationships in formats that may carry a certain resemblance to semantic network. Numerous ways exist to obtain concept maps from individuals, and a variety of techniques exist to analyze them to yield representations of knowledge structures (e.g., Beyerbach & Smith, 1990;Champagne & Klopfer, 1981; Brumby, 1983;Edwards & Fraser, 1983;Hoz, 1986; Roehler, Duffy, Conley, Herrmann, Johnson, & Michelson, 1990). On the whole, concept mapping is a low-inference measure that requires lesser interpretation of the derived representations, even when an essay is transformed into a concept map format by the researcher (e.g., McKeown & Beck, 1990).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many versions of concept mapping exist, all of which originated from and relied on Novak's (1980) work (e.g., Wallace and Mintzes, 1990;Wandersee, 1990;White and Gunstone, 1992). Champagne & Klopfer (1981) modified the constraints in Ausubel's Theory of Memory, which imposed hierarchicality on all concept maps and cognitive structure representations. Their revision yielded the ConSAT version of concept mapping, which is characterized as being (a) compatible with current theories of semantic memory, and (b) applicable not only to domains where knowledge is conceived to be more structured (i.e., hard sciences), but to disciplines whose structure is less clear, less distinguished, less salient, and more equivocal (i.e., social sciences, humanities, and medical education) (Bussiba, 1992;Gonik, 1990; Gurfinkel, 1990; Maher et al, 1991;Pomson, 1994;Tomer, 1989;Zellermayer & Hoz, 1995; Pomson & Hoz, in press).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Among the data-gathering techniques are word association (e.g., Preece, 1976a;Gunstone, 1980), tree (or linear graph) construction (e.g., Fillenbaum & Rapoport, 1971), free sort (e.g., Hambleton & Sheehan, 1977;Gorodetsky & Hoz, 1985), similarity rating (e.g., P.E. Johnson, 1967), ordered trees (Naveh-Benjamin, McKitchie, Lin, & Tucker, 1986), questionnaires, structured interviews and experimental tasks (Peterson, Fennema, Carpenter, & Loef, 1989), card sorting, and teaching assignments (e.g., Markham, Mintzes, & Jones, 1994;Stein, Baxter, & Leinhardt, 1990), and concept mapping (e.g., Champagne, Klopfer, DeSena, & Squires, 1981; Brumby, 1983;Morine-Dershimer, 1989;Fisher, 1990;Hoz, Tomer, & Tamir, 1990; Novak, 1990a,b; Ross & Munby, 1991). Mathematical scaling methods, which are generally nonmetric, are then applied to these proximity matrices or the other summated data (other than concept maps) to portray the patterns underlying these matrices in graphical, clustered, or spatial configurations.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Psychometric and edumetric validity of dimensions of geomorphological knowledge which are tapped by concept mapping

Hoz

Bowman

Chacham³

1997

J. Res. Sci. Teach.

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The validity of several dimensions of knowledge which were inferred from concept maps was assessed for its psychometric and edumetric aspects. Data were collected from 14 students who enrolled in the university first-year introductory geomorphology course and in its prerequisite introductory geology course. They took an objective geomorphology test, the tree construction task, and the Standardized Concept Structuring Analysis Technique (SConSAT) version of concept mapping. Comparisons among these dimensions of knowledge before and after the geomorphology course yielded convergent evidence. For the psychometric perspective, the SConSAT version of concept mapping and tree construction had similar knowledge structure representations, and the cognitive map correctness was moderately positively correlated with the objective test but not with the geomorphology course test. For the edumetric perspective, the majority of the dimensions of knowledge structures from the SConSAT showed large improvements following the geomorphology course. This evidence shows that the knowledge structure dimensions have moderate to good construct validity which warrant their widespread use for evaluating learning outcomes in both experimental and classroom settings. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 925-947, 1997. Concept mapping is widely used in science education research and development. Most of its educational applications aim to describe features of student knowledge, assess it, and detect and characterize structural and substantive changes in this knowledge (namely, learning outcomes) and for instructional purposes (e.g., Horton, McConney, Gallo, Woods, Senn, & Hamelin, 1993;Mason, 1992;Roth & Roychoudhury, 1992, 1994Wallace & Mintzes, 1990;Wandersee, 1990). This interest may be due in part to the fact that concept mapping is consistent with a constructivist perspective of learning when it is used to examine changes in the content and organization of student knowledge by emphasizing the process of the construction and the uniqueness of the individual products (Beyerbach & Smith, 1990;Roth & Roychoudhury, 1992). In this articles we report the assessment of the psychometric and edumetric aspects of the validity of certain dimensions of knowledge derived by concept mapping in the context of a university course in geomorphology. We will review definitions of cognitive structure, outline JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 34, NO. 9, PP. 925-947 (1997) © the ideas that underlie construct validation, and describe briefly concept mapping as a probe of cognitive structure. Theoretical FrameworkIn recent decades, educational and psychological researchers came to treat learning outcomes in terms of the relations between the structure of the discipline (content area) and the individual's "cognitive structure" or "knowledge structure" (e.g., Howard, 1987;Nitko, 1989). Some of the definitions for the latter hypothetical construct are (1) a semantic space that is an organization or pattern of the internal...

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Structural representations of students' knowledge before and after science instruction

Cited by 84 publications

References 5 publications

Contributions of Student Questioning and Prior Knowledge to Construction of Knowledge from Reading Information Text

Contributions of Student Questioning and Prior Knowledge to Construction of Knowledge from Reading Information Text

Probing high school students' cognitive structures and key areas of learning difficulties on ethanoic acid using the flow map method

Psychometric and edumetric validity of dimensions of geomorphological knowledge which are tapped by concept mapping

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